This is follow up to my BLOG last week about “Who should fund university research”? I thought it might be illustrative to examine actual data from my university. Not surprisingly for a large enterprise, UC Davis tracks sources of all monies coming into the university, and oversees the expenditure of such funds.

There are two basic ways research funding can come into the university – as a formal contract or grant, or as a donation. In the former case, there is some type of a grant application or description of work to be carried out (but not what the results of the research will be!!!) for which the funding is provided, in the second case it is what is called an “unrestricted” donation. This is money that is directed towards an individual professor, program or department with no further specification as to what the money is to be used for. Of course such funding is still managed by the university, and can’t be used for a vacation to Hawaii. Often it is used as seed funding to undertake a professor’s favorite research idea, perhaps one that is a bit too “out there” and risky to secure traditional grant funding in the absence of supporting preliminary data. In that sense it is like a donation to your favorite charity, you donate the money because you like the type of work that charity does. However you cannot directly specify exactly what the charity is to do with the money you donated.

Grants and contracts

These are the monies that really run research programs. The total awards by calendar year at UC Davis is in the ballpark of $750 million (i.e. three quarters of a billion). That is a lot of money, but UC Davis is a big university with a medical school which includes a hospital, a veterinary school, and all of the colleges that make up the campus. If we pessimistically (realistically) assume a 10% funding rate of public research funding that means the UC Davis faculty are on average writing $7.5 billion worth of grants each year, and are successfully bringing in one tenth of that. And to reiterate these funds are used to support graduate students, buy research supplies, perform experiments and advance knowledge. UC Davis is a powerful economic engine for California, generating $8.1 billion in statewide economic activity and supporting 72,000 jobs.

The approximate breakdown for the $786 million received in fiscal year 2014-15 was $427 million (54%) awards from the federal government, and likely a big chunk of research funding is also from the state government. $66.1 million (8.4%) was awards from foundations, and $59.4 million (6.7%) awards from industry sponsors. I think that is an interesting point, that UC Davis receives more sponsored research funding from foundations than it does from industry sponsors. The School of Medicine received the largest share of research grants at UC Davis with $264 million (34%), followed by the College of Agricultural and Environmental Sciences at $155 million (20%), and the School of Veterinary Medicine at $114 million (14.5%).

Donations

This pool of monies is more modest than that brought in by grants and contracts. I could only get this data for fiscal year, rather than calendar year, but it is in the vicinity of $200 million. Now the question that perhaps has been asked most frequently is how much funding is coming from specific companies – specifically those associated with the so-called “Agrochemical academic complex”? That all depends upon how you define such industries, but let’s go with the so-called “Big 6”; that is Monsanto, Syngenta, Bayer, BASF, DuPont/DuPont pioneer, and Dow.

The following table has the breakdown of total grants and contracts, donations and those two figures totaled, and then the breakout of how much of that funding and the (percentage of total) associated with the cumulative funding coming from the “Big 6” in recent years. (The numbers differ slightly from those above due to fiscal versus calendar year accounting.)

Not surprisingly most of the funding from the “Big 6” was associated with research working in plant sciences and entomology. Some went to the medical school because the search for “Bayer” also captured research funding sponsored by “Bayer Healthcare”. A number of the donations were to Cooperative Extension county-based advisors performing field research with various crops. And just for transparency, none of it was directed to my research program (which is not surprising as I work on animals not plants!). Some was earmarked for work in specific crops like figs, pistachios, strawberries, rice, onions, woody crops and viticulture. And that is not surprising because California grows hundreds of specialty crops. Noticeably none of these crops have commercialized genetically engineered varieties, and their breeding programs are mostly run by public sector scientists.The one thing California does not grow much of is large acreage corn and soybeans. We do not have the right climate and conditions for these crops, and there are high-value alternative crops that CA farmers chose to grow. As a result, UC Davis does not do much research in these field crops, and the university therefore does not get much industry research funding for work in these crops.

I would wager that the University of Kentucky, home of the Kentucky Derby, probably has industry funding supporting is equine science program, ’cause they have a huge equine industry in that state. In general when a university has an important industry in its state, that industry helps to support research at that state-located public university. And in the case of California there is an amazing number of agricultural commodities grown – the fruit and vegetable industry raises a cornucopia of varieties in the state, and UC Davis has renowned brewing and wine making programs. As an example, the brewing science program at UC Davis has received several sizable donations from industry, including the recent $2 million donation from the owners of the local Sierra Nevada Brewing Company. Cheers to science-based beer brewing and wine making!

How does this breakdown compare to other land grant universities?

My colleague Kevin Folta at the University of Florida posted this useful graphic for the gators (University of Florida).

Funding to University of Florida FY 2015-2016 broken down by funding source

In the case of the University of Florida, the faculty brought in $140 million in sponsored funding in FY 2015-16, and of that 70% was from federal agencies, 15.5% was from foundations, and 3.5% was from corporations and industry. Kevin makes the observation in his blog regarding agricultural industry funders:

“They are frequently the beneficiaries of increased knowledge in agriculture, as well as the training and education we provide to the next generation of scientists”. I look forward to his next BLOG piece where he promises to write about whether industry support of science matters.

So there you have it – or at least a snapshot from two large agricultural universities as to which entities fund universities. By far the biggest source of funding is federal research grants – as might be expected at a public university.

Now I must go and focus my efforts on writing my next federal grant application – which unfortunately has a ~90% probability of not being funded and will likely only ever be read by 2 grant reviewers. As compared to this BLOG which has 100% chance of not securing funding for my research program, but hopefully will be of interest to more than 2 readers.

It has been more than two years since the FDA released its draft “Guidance for Industry #187” “Regulation of Intentionally Altered Genomic DNA in Animals”, that proposes to regulate ANY “intentionally altered genomic DNA” in food animals as a veterinary drug, irrespective of product novelty or risk. Human intention does not equate to risk. This […]

Back in January I wrote a blog entitled Proposition 2 déjà vu about a proposed California ballot initiative entitled “The Prevention of Cruelty to Farm Animals Act”. Sure enough that initiative qualified for the 2018 ballot, despite the clear data on the impacts as detailed in my three blog posts on this issue (Six hens […]

Because I did not think biotechnology and hen housing were controversial enough topics, I thought I would wade into antibiotic use in food animals. Actually, the only reason I am doing this blog is because of a Twitter exchange with Marc Brazeau from Food and Farm Discussion Lab late last year. He posed several questions to […]

Recently at the Davis Farmer’s Market, I was approached by a volunteer who was collecting signatures for a new initiative for the 2018 CA ballot. These ballot initiatives are a part of the California landscape and in 2016 posed questions to voters ranging from marijuana legalization (it was approved) to use of condoms in pornographic […]

Proposition 2, an initiative passed by California voters in 2008, required that egg-laying hens (and calves raised for veal and pregnant pigs) be confined only in ways that “allow these animals to lie down, stand up, fully extend their limbs and turn around freely”. Unfortunately no further clarification was given to guide producers as to […]

On a trip to my local grocery story on Christmas Eve, I was struck by a phenomena in the egg case. There were plenty of choices available to shoppers, and this picture says a thousand words. Shoppers purchased the least expensive eggs. They had the choice of more expensive cage-free, organic and pasture-raised eggs, but […]

An academic colleague of mine recently tweeted that Netflix’s Okja was worth watching. He is not an agricultural scientist or breeder, but he is a geneticist, and I was surprised that the image of Okja did not trigger his scientific angst. I realize Okja is a science-fiction fantasy movie – but the science makes no […]

My first BLOG for 2017, and in fact all 9 of this year’s BLOGs, were triggered by either bad science or blatant misinformation about agriculture. Typically the only way a topic raises to the level of justifying me writing a BLOG is that the balance of my annoyance at the erroneous material that is being […]

Summer caught up with me and I have not blogged in a while, but recently I spent 9 consecutive days watching a docuseries called “GMOs revealed”. I finished watching the series feeling dismayed and confused. Dismayed as a scientist at the fearmongering and fallacies that were being promoted with disciplined repetition based on anecdotes and […]

The standard for voluntary food labeling in the US is that it must be “truthful and not misleading”. I wish that was true for all speech. In this era of alternative facts and disdain for expertise, there are many politicized topics where objective facts and inconvenient truths are ignored if they don’t match up with […]